It’s so very “eh”.
Netflix threw around a lot of money last year in directly helping to produce several shows, like B: The Beginning, Devilman Crybaby, and least of all, A.I.C.O., which launched with such a disastrously bad dub that they wound up re-doing the entire thing.
Of course the dub isn’t really my issue with A.I.C.O.. My problem lies more in the fact that it’s a little bit of a ripoff of Parasite Eve, only handled with a lot more tonal inconsistencies and with a 3rd Birthday-era level of stupid plotting. I only got halfway through and I could predict all the twists I wound up looking up, and none of them are even all that meaningful, up to and including sharing an entire Tomato Reveal with said 3rd Birthday. A.I.C.O. is just dull and lacking in substance or even a decent production value, as aside from a couple of moments of fluid motion, this is easily the worst looking Netflix-financed show of 2018. When you consider that A) this is Bones, who apparently spent much more on making My Hero Academia and B) that unlike B or Devilman Crybaby, this is a direct adaptation of source material – meaning a great deal of the work was already half-done – I don’t get where the money went here. It’s not the worst-looking show of the year by any means (not in a world where we had Master of Ragnarok and My Sister My Writer) but it just doesn’t live up to Bones’ standard at all. I’m really hoping that they can give the upcoming Fire Force adaptation the same love they give MHA.
While it had the advantage over B because the plot actually makes sense, it loses way too many points for the plot being stupid – again, it’s a near-direct ripoff of Parasite Eve, down to the biological catastrophe being caused by a medical procedure gone wrong, but without any of the thought that went into most of Eve – and six episodes in, I didn’t have much of a desire to see it through.
5/10.
The Arcane Archive 